1. Grid Technologies  Slide text

2. What is Grid?  The World Wide Web provides seamless access to information that is stored in many millions of different geographical locations  The Grid is an emerging infrastructure that provides seamless access to computing power and data storage capacity distributed over the globe Source of Information Server Users

3. What is Grid ?  Collection of geographically distributed heterogeneous resources “Most generalized, globalized form of distributed computing”  “An infrastructure that enables flexible, secure, coordinated resource sharing among dynamic collections of individuals, institutions and resources” Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman  Offers access to a virtual and very powerful computing system  A user does not care, in which resource his job / jobs is going to be executed

4. What is Grid Computing?

5. Grid Computing  Like the Web, grid computing keeps complexities hidden; multiple users enjoy a single, unified experience.  Unlike the Web, which mainly enables communication, grid computing permits full collaboration in support of common business or research goals.  Like peer-to-peer, grid computing allows users to share files.  Unlike peer-to-peer, grid computing supports many-to-many sharing–not only files, but other resources as well.  Like clustering and distributed computing, grids bring computing resources together.  Unlike clusters and distributed computing, which require physical proximity and operating homogeneity, grids can be geographically distributed and heterogeneous.  Like virtualization technologies, grid computing enables the virtualization of IT resources.  Unlike virtualization technologies, which virtualizes a single system, grid computing enables the virtualization of vast and disparate IT resources.

6. Benefits of Grid Computing  Infrastructure Optimization  Increased Collaboration  Increased Availability

7. Grid Applications in Research  High-performance computing  Research collaboration and data sharing  Weather analysis, simulation and forecasting  High Energy Physics  Visualization and simulation  Life Sciences, Bioinformatics and Computational Biology  Environmental analysis  Content creation and video on demand (Access Grid)  Nanotechnology  Earthquake seismic analysis  Homeland security  Number theory  Engineering design

8. Types of Grids  Computational Grid  Data Grid  Network Grid A computational grid is a grid that has the processing power as the main computing resource shared among its nodes. This is the most common type of grid and it has been used to perform high- performance computing to tackle processing-demanding tasks. Just as a computational grid has the processing power as the main computing resource shared among their nodes, a data grid has the data storage capacity as its main shared resource. Such a grid can be regarded as a massive data storage system built up from portions of a large number of storage devices. This is known as either a network grid or a delivery grid. Such a grid has as its main purpose to provide fault-tolerant and high-performance communication services. In this sense, each grid node works as a data router between two communication points, providing data-caching and other facilities to speed up the communications between such points.

9.  Open Standards Software engineers developing the Grid services IT companies  So the applications, that run in one Grid site, will run in all others with the same way  Global Grid Forum  Defines Grid standards ( Open Grid Standards Architecture )  Develops best practices and specifications in cooperation with other leading standards organizations, software vendors, and users  Globus Toolkit  Developed by Globus Alliance  Open-source infrastructure that provides many of the basic services needed to construct Grid applications

10. Collaboration inside Virtual Organizations  “A set of individuals and / or institutions defined by highly controlled sharing rules, with resource providers and consumers defining clearly and carefully just what is shared, who is allowed to share and the conditions under which sharing occurs” Ian Foster  Abstract entities grouping users, institutions and resources in the same administrative domain  What is going to be shared ? resources licenses software services special equipment Internet bandwidth

11. Grid Architecture (1) Users -Applications “Grid” Middleware Resources Network Network layer Resource layer Middleware layer Application and serviceware layer

12. Middleware  The Grid Middleware ensures seamless communication between different computers and different parts of the world  The Grid middleware hide much of the complexity of the Grid environment from the user, giving the impression that all of these resources are available in a coherent virtual computer centre  LCG, Globus, Condor

13. Middleware  Optimises use of the widely dispersed resources  Organises efficient access to scientific data  Deals with authentication to the different sites that the scientists will be using  Finds convenient places for the “job” to be run  Interfaces to local site authorisation and resource allocation policies  Runs the jobs  Monitors progress  Recovers from problems  Tells you when the work is complete and transfers the result back!

14. gLite - Middleware Many VOs need sharing of resources through services Accessing Allocating Monitoring Accounting Grid Middleware - Layer between services and physical resources gLite - Lightweight Middleware for Grid Computing http://www.glite.org

15. gLite - Background LCG: Globus 2 basedWeb services based gLite-2gLite-1LCG-2LCG-1

16. User Interface (1)  Allows users to access Grid functionalities  A machine where users have a personal account and where the user certificate is installed  Gateway to Grid Services UI RB WN CE WN SE Job’s Submission

17. User Interface (2)  It provides a Command Line Interface to perform some basic Grid operations such as:  List all the resources suitable to execute a given job  Submit jobs for execution  Show the status of submitted jobs  Cancel one or more jobs  Retrieve the logging and bookkeeping information of jobs  Retrieve the output of finished jobs  Copy, replicate and delete files from Grid

18. Resource Broker  The resource broker is responsible for the acceptance of submitted jobs and for sending those jobs to the appropriate Computing Element  Retrieves information from Information Catalogues so as to find the proper available resources depending on the job requirements UI RB WN CE WN SE Job’s Submission

19. Computing Element  “Grid interface”  It is built on a farm of a computing nodes called Worker Nodes (WNs)  Executes the basic queues functions  In the Computing Element, a process is being executed that accepts jobs and dispatch them for execution to the Worker nodes (WNs)  The state of an executing job is being watched by the Computing Element UI RB WN CE WN  Each LCG-2 site is consisted of one or more CEs and a farm of WNs behind them Job’s Submission

20. Worker Node  The submitted jobs are being executed in the Worker nodes  Need only outbound connectivity  Only basic services of middleware are required in the Worker nodes such as Application libraries Application Programming Interfaces (API) Commands for performing actions on Grid resources and Grid data UI RB CE WN Job’s Submission

21. Storage Element  It provides uniform access to storage resources (it may control simple disk servers, large disk arrays or Mass Storage Systems (MSS))  Each LCG-2 site provides one or more SEs UI RB WN CE WN SE Job’s Submission

22. Information Service (IS)  It provides information about the Grid resources and their status  This information is essential for the operation of the whole Grid  Location of availiable Computing Elements to run jobs  Finding of SEs that holding replicas of Grid files and the catalogs keeping the information on these files  The information is stored in databases  The published information is used for monitoring purposes  for analyzing usage and performance of the Grid, detecting fault situations and any other interesting events accounting purposes  for creating statistics of the applications run by the users in the resources

23. Monitoring Service  Monitoring Tools designed for Grid systems  Low level data like CPU load, available memory, storage utilization, etc  Data about services  Data about Grid like the number of each site’s CPUs, the number of submitted jobs, the number of executing jobs, the number of waiting jobs, the number of each site’s free CPU, the available storage space, etc

24. Secure Access Service  Access policy Resource providers and users must define clearly and carefully what is shared, who is allowed to share, and the conditions under which sharing occurs  Authentication Mechanism for establishing the identity of a user or resource  Authorization Mechanism for determining whether an operation is consistent with the defined sharing relationships